Sunday, December 14, 2014

The 32nd
edition of the Turin Film Festival, an annual event that is as old as this blogger, ran
in my hometown from November 21 to 29. This year the festival offered a rich
selection of American movies of the 70s, so I had the opportunity to catch up with little-seen films like the irresistibly funny Taking Off (1971), which was Czech director Miloš Forman's foray into Hollywood, as well
as renowned ones, like Sydney Pollack's paranoia-drenched Three Days
of the Condor (1975), for which I've miraculously managed to stay
away from spoilers for 32 years. Among the films in competition I saw the short
feature film Zakloni (Shelters) by Ivan Salatić from
Montenegro, in combination with Okean (Ocean) by Serbian
director Tamara Drakulić; I give a brief account of the screenings in the
following.

Zakloni,
in my opinion the best of the two, manages to condense in its 24-minutes
running time a vivid portrait of an adolescent boy named Luka (excellently
played by non-professional actor Luka Petrone) who lives in Herceg Novi, the
director's own hometown in Montenegro. Half documentary, half fiction film, it
consists of some brief but carefully composed scenes of different length and
pace. Most of them are rather static, as if reflecting Luka's mood following
his parents' separation — an event that is concisely hinted at at the beginning
but informs the whole film. Occasionally we are given more dynamic shots, like
when Luka plunges in a canal overlooking a now abandoned military base; the
impact of this scene is enhanced by an abrupt break with the previous one, and
by the fact that the camera follows Luka down till the splash with a rapid and
precise movement. Such breaks are frequent throughout. In fact, the film unfolds
like a juxtaposition of self-contained moments rather than a temporal
progression; narrative is reduced to the minimum, although a final encounter
between Luka and his away-from-home father provides a sort of narrative closure.
The environment plays a crucial role, too. At times the town's architecture seems
to swallow up people's lives; this largely depends on Salatić's framings, that
often relegate persons to constrained, off-centered portions of the screen.
Particularly vivid is a high-angle shot of a woman sunbathing on a narrow, cage-like
balcony, with the house's concrete wall occupying most of the frame (see
screenshot above). Similarly, in the closing scene father and son appear overwhelmed
by the rigid geometry of a sport facility, the seats lined up like tombstones
in a graveyard.

Mr. Salatić
was kind enough to do a brief Q&A with the audience after the screening. He
explained how the abrupt cuts between scenes happening at different times and
places were intended to reflect how memories surface in our mind, more often
triggered by moment-to-moment sensations rather than by a cause-effect chain.
He also said that the compression of space in some of the shots was aimed at
suggesting what's outside of the frame; for me, it worked differently, as I
enjoyed those shots more for their abstract quality than for what they didn't
show — more for how they communicated the absence of vital space rather than
the presence of a wider space all around. Anyway, if "cinema is a matter
of what's in the frame and what's out", as Scorsese famously pointed out,
Salatić seems to have perfectly internalized the motto. He also told us that
the film sprung from an image he had in mind, that of a boy taking a plunge into
the pool at the military base. He then wrote a short story that served as
starting point for the shooting; however, the story was not used strictly for
the film's script, but remained a quite different work from the final film. When
asked how he found the actor playing the main character, Mr. Salatić said that
he met him by chance in his hometown's main square, and he immediately realized
that the boy possessed exactly what he was searching for. In fact, he soon
abandoned the casting process, which he finds to be a tedious, even painful
practice.

Tamara
Drakulić's Okean was screened immediately afterward in the
presence of the director. It chronicles the journey she took from her native
town in Serbia till Hawaii to attend a dear friend's funeral. In the very first
shot the camera lingers on some sea waves, while a voice-over introduces the purpose
of the journey. At regular intervals the camera abruptly readjusts the framing,
at times pointing towards the horizon, other times towards the water's edge. At
first I thought that these sudden camera movements foreshadowed the film's
visual style, but I was proven wrong. In fact, after a couple of interviews
with friends saying her goodbye, what we have from then on is a sort of
contemplative logbook of the voyage, which mostly unfolds aboard a cargo ship traveling
across the Atlantic Ocean. This central section largely consists of static, lyrical
shots taken from the ship's deck at various hours of the day and with different
winds blowing. The voice-over often provides an eerily detached commentary on
the images, with descriptions of various types of winds serving as a kind of
loose division in chapters. This meditative mood is sometimes interrupted by
more down-to-earth moments. At one point, a member of the crew explains how the
Atlantic currents affect the ship's route; shots of the director and her
boyfriend killing time in their cabin are inserted throughout (the lack of remarkable
happenings in the course of the long-awaited journey reminded me of Joseph
Conrad's The Shadow Line).

I was
especially impressed by the gorgeousness of the shots taken from the ship's
deck; I suppose that the setting's inherent beauty had a considerable part in
it. Ms. Drakulić displays a taste for exquisite framings comparable to Salatić's
when it comes to static shots, but she seems less confident in moving the
camera. When a weather balloon is thrown from the ship, arguably in order to collect
meteorological data, the camera seems unable to keep its trajectory within the
frame, despite keeping a certain distance from the source; the result is an involuntarily
jerky camera movement that even made me question the intentionality of the
first scene. The same happens during the ash scattering ceremony, where the camera's
shakiness is particularly inappropriate given the unrepeatability of the event,
and the importance it has in the context of the story. On the whole, I found
Drakulić's film most effective when it combined poetic voice-over commentary
with evocative imagery; more dynamic scenes didn't quite match up with the rest
of the movie due to erratic camerawork.

Both films
seem to me promising works in their own way. Mr. Salatić may want to venture into the feature-length form in the future; to Ms. Drakulić I would suggest combining
her marked compositional skills with a greater care for non-static shots. All
in all, two pleasant surprises from a region that rarely makes its way to our
screens.

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